How Flying Taxis Revolutionize Urban Transit
How Flying Taxis Revolutionize Urban Transit
More flying bus, less flying sports car
eVTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles) are quieter, safer, and cleaner versions of traditional helicopters. Once deployed at scale, they'll constitute a change on par with the advent of the personal car. They/ll make transportation systems more multi-modal, urban design will change to accommodate their use, and they may even affect land prices and the growth patterns of cities.
Before we get into all that, though, we have to understand where we're at today. The state of the technology, likely paths for commercialization, and regulatory environment will all shape how eVTOLs get deployed and appreciating each of those factors helps us see the impact eVTOLs will have in the near future.
The SPECS
eVTOLs -- as the name suggests -- takeoff and land vertically. Like helicopters, they only need a landing pad's worth of space for pickup/dropoff. Where they differ from helicopters, however, is almost everywhere else.
First, they're about a thousand times quieter than a helicopter. This will let them operate in populated areas without deafening everyone within earshot. They're also electric, which means lower fuel costs and greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest improvement over helicopters, though, might be in the area of safety.
eVTOLs have multiple rotors and use distributed electric propulsion, wherein each rotor operates independently. If one rotor goes down, the others can adjust to compensate. This keeps the vehicle in the air, a redundancy helicopters don't have today. Manufacturers are also experimenting with systems like ballistic multi-parachutes that could make even crash landings survivable.
The Business
Most development is happening in the U.S. and Europe with a few players in places like China and Brazil.
Most companies plan to commercialize by providing air-taxi services1, with the first use case being transportation to and from airports. As an example, Joby Aviation claims it can get from JFK to Manhattan in an easy 7 minutes as compared to the better part of an hour from house by car.
Given the use case, the initial ideal customer is likely a business traveler. Over time, though, the service will scale, routes will diversify, and prices will get lower. We have every reason to expect that this will be a product that gradually moves down market as it expands.
That said, expansion will have three major determinants. Technical improvements, go-to-market strategy, and regulation will all shape when and how service rolls out.
The possible, the profitable, and the permissible
First, and most obviously, the state of the technology will constrain eVTOL deployment. Weight reduction and improvements in battery capacity are two major factors. Improvements in either area could increase travel distance and passenger count. Business strategy may also be significant. Here again, Joby Aviation makes for a good example.
Joby is backed by Delta Airlines. As part of their funding agreement, Joby will work exclusively with Delta, providing transit to and from Delta hubs for at least the first 5 years of operation.
For Joby, they're getting capital and direct access to their ideal customer. For Delta, they're able to provide a differentiated service for their passengers. Where this could impact eVTOL adoption is if Delta chooses to subsidize Joby trips. Following a loss leader strategy for flights on Joby could fast-track adoption.
Wrapped around all that, though, are the regulations.
National governments are folding eVTOLs into air traffic control systems across the world. The FAA (U.S.) and the EASA (Europe) are in the process of approving designs and both agencies are aligning on standards. Harmonizing design requirements will let manufacturers create single models fit for both markets. This, in turn, will help production scale faster. Regulators elsewhere are also likely to follow along as the U.S. and Europe converge on design standards.
Zooming in on the U.S., it will be up to the FAA to determine flight paths for eVTOL use. What's less clear (at least to me), is how regulation will affect vertiport placement.
As we covered earlier, eVTOLs will need landing pads. Even the initial traveling-to-and-from-the-airport use case will require landing sites spread across major metros.
Due to their internal politics, however, U.S. cities have historically been anti-development. The process to approve construction – of anything, let alone landing pads – has multiple veto points. Small groups of residents often have easy legal, regulatory, and political recourse for preventing everything from housing to wind farms. But if vertiports become revenue generators for city governments, that might incentivize municipal bureaucrats to save projects from death by public engagement. How is unclear and will probably differ by city, but if enough people want to get something done, institutional inertia will be overcome.
Flying Cars and 280 Characters
eVTOLs will revolutionize transportation. They'll dramatically reduce commute times and integrate entire regions. They'll also make our existing transit systems more multimodal. They may even impact how we design buildings and lay out entire neighborhoods.
As the Crow Flies
eVTOLs are going to fill a need for high-speed, mid-range transit. Existing models travel up to 200 mph, outperforming anything on the ground (at least in the States), and because they travel as the crow flies, they're unconstrained by topography. Bodies of water, uneven terrain, and unpurchasable rights-of-way all be damned. To better appreciate the impact, let's look at an example.
Seattleites, for instance, know that traveling East to West is slower than going North to South. This is a product of more road capacity going in one direction than the other, as well as current levels of traffic.
Here’s how far you can expect to get by car in 30 minutes, starting in the Ballard neighborhood.
Starting from the same place, an eVTOL has a 30-minute travel radius of, well, this:
The U.S. may be institutionally incapable of building transit, but eVTOLs sidestep those problems by requiring less physical infrastructure (i.e. no tracks, lanes, etc) and by having their right-of-way governed by federal bureaucrats.
If we’re taking bets, I’d wager we see scaled-up eVTOL networks in cities across the U.S. well before we figure out how to get fixed rail transit done at the local or even regional levels.
It's a Small World After all
eVTOLs may decrease the value of land in urban cores and increase the value of land on the periphery. To better understand that, though, we should discuss Marchetti's Constant.
Marchetti's Constant is the observation that humans tend to limit their commuting distance to however far they can travel in ~30 minutes. Historically, that has meant that transportation technology limited city size.
As transportation technology advanced from walking to horses to rail to cars, cities increased in average size. Each advancement in technology reduced the effective distance between any two points. This allowed people to substitute more expensive central real estate for outlying locations. For a concrete example, we can think back to the San Francisco Bay Area during the pre-pandemic years.
Business was booming, primarily in tech offices up and down SF's Market Street. Rents in SF were through the roof due to so many people making so much money all in one place. Rents in neighboring Oakland were also high, though, especially near Oakland's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations.
Many Oakland-based workers made ~12-mile commutes to downtown SF in 20 minutes riding BART. Conversely, some San Francisco residents commuted 6 miles to reach downtown but took 45 minutes to do so.
The BART system made certain parts of Oakland effectively closer to San Francisco’s economic core than SF’s own outlying neighborhoods. As a result, land around Oakland’s BART stations garnered a premium. And certain parts of SF were probably a little less expensive than they would have been in the absence of transit-accessible East Bay housing.
This is what eVTOLs stand to do for metro areas as they scale. They'll reduce the effective distances between economic centers and land on the outskirts. This will redistribute demand for land to the periphery. And, as a final consequence, facilitate outward urban growth.
Vertical Placemaking
eVTOLs will impact the built environment as a mass transit system, not a personal vehicle.
Vertiports will be fixed destinations. These will increase the value of adjacent land and serve as an anchor for the same kinds of merchants that typically surround busy transit hubs. Different from other transit systems, though, vertiports will be elevated high off the ground. If we picture a landing pad on top of a tall building, we can also imagine what we could do with the floors underneath.
With an eVTOL landing pad on its roof, a building becomes a vertical liminal space. It changes from a terminal destination to a space that people pass through.
My pipe dream here is repurposing multi-story parking garages in a post-personal vehicle world. The top levels get converted into eVTOL landing pads. The levels are repurposed for commerce (think Tokyo under track infill). The lower levels are where passengers connect to other forms of transit for the last mile.
Similarly, eVTOLs might reorient how we build structures from scratch. When buildings become places we travel through as well as to, design will change. We could see mixed-use structures where retail lines the route from the top to the surface level.
In terms of the building itself, there might also be efforts to make the interior feel like one contiguous space. However things play out, eVTOLs will change the way we're using the existing built environment. With time and scale, they’ll change how we build the environment as well.
Conclusion
eVTOLs are still a few years from commercial launch, and maybe a decade from achieving any meaningful scale. Once that happens, though, they’re going to revolutionize the way cities function. They’re going to make the urban world a smaller place. They’re also going to reconfigure the way we build and use infrastructure across cities everywhere. And I believe that they’ll have the biggest impact in all the U.S. cities still saddled with maxed-out car-centric infrastructure.2
As eVTOLs start rolling out, I’ll be excited to see the opportunities they create and the cities they allow us to build once they make the world an even smaller place.
Yes, the Jetson One is totally a thing, but for many reasons I think personal eVTOLs remain expensive toys and for rural use cases for the foreseeable future
I’m looking at you Houston and LA